


Sentiment

by greymissed



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 15:04:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13720200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greymissed/pseuds/greymissed
Summary: Emotions are abhorrent to him. But it doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel them.OrSherlock decides to text Irene after The Final Problem.





	Sentiment

Emotions are abhorrent to him. They are the grit in a sensitive instrument, the crack in the lens. But he’s learnt that it doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel them.

 

He hasn’t always been this self-aware. Before meeting the Woman, emotions had never posed an issue for him. It wasn't that he’d been suppressing them; no – apart from some… affection he felt for his family and a handful of persons (if that), he truly had not felt much in the way of emotion, and had not considered himself to be missing out. Romantic entanglement was out of the question.

 

And then the Woman had happened. She’d intrigued him from their very first meeting. At first glance she appeared to be nothing more than a bag of cheap tricks, a dominatrix using her nakedness to distract and disconcert. But she had quickly thrown that notion out the window, showing herself to be far more clever and observant than anyone else he had encountered (with the exception of Mycroft), and outwitting him with her mind (with the help of a whip and syringe as well, unfortunately).

 

In the weeks after their first encounter, he found his mind wandering to her with annoying frequency. He’d put that down to the incessant texts she’d insisted on sending, and comforted himself with the fact that he wasn’t deigning to respond. He told himself that he was keeping her highly inappropriate text alert simply to remind himself of a formidable opponent; a remarkable adventure.1 But meeting her seemed to have unlocked something in him, awakened some part of him that had long lain dormant.

 

And then she’d gone and faked her own death.

 

Seeing her Christmas gift on his mantelpiece had set his mind racing as to what it could be and why – clearly the Woman would never really send him something so sentimental as a Christmas gift, and in any event nothing remotely as banal as the leather wallet Molly Hooper had picked out. And it was just like the Woman to have snuck something into his flat without even _him_ noticing. But his blood had run cold when he’d realized what the contents of the crimson package signified. When at the morgue he’d identified what he’d thought was the Woman’s body – an empty vessel, utterly inconsequential now that her mind was no longer attached to it – something in him had gone still. Some strange, unnamed ache in the gut that indicated that something was wrong with him. He hadn’t understood grief then.

 

It was just the loss of a worthy adversary that he considered an utter waste; that was all. It was that he’d lost his chance to beat her. That was what he’d told himself as he’d asked Mycroft if he ever thought there was something wrong with them. That was what he’d told himself as he’d taken a drag of the cigarette that Mycroft had proffered as a condolence, as he’d felt the need to grasp his violin and _play_. He’d truly believed then that he didn’t care. Looking back now, the signs were all there but he’d failed or refused to recognize them. What sort of detective was he? His refusal to acknowledge his emotions, abhorrent though they were, had clouded his judgment of the truth.

 

It then transpired that the Woman wasn’t dead after all; was in fact alive and scheming to get her phone back. The fog had cleared from his brain. He didn’t dwell on the reason for the palpable relief that had surged through him on his discovery that she was alive, merely channeled it to deal with the fallout from others also after her phone.

 

And then one day out of the blue, he’d found her asleep in his bed. Stripped of her makeup and eyes softly closed in slumber, she’d looked deceptively vulnerable. Once awake, however, the game was back on.

 

These encounters with the Woman only reinforced his admiration for the way her mind worked. She was truly (and he meant that in the most flattering way possible) a force to be reckoned with. She, like he, saw things that others missed. She, like he, was always two steps ahead. She, like he, loved games and excelled at them. Only she never played by the rules.

 

The realisation that she had been playing with him all along did not affect him as much as the realization that he’d let himself be played by her. He had underestimated her time and again. He’d let his defences down around her more than once, and had been burned. Would he never learn? The shame was nearly unbearable.

 

Yet even as he’d blandly taken her down and all but ripped apart her sentiment, stripping away her defences in front of Mycroft, he’d felt the heaviness of the words he was saying settle over him like a shroud.

 

_Sentiment? What are you talking about?_ She’d asked, her confidence faltering slightly.

 

_You,_ he’d answered, eyes never leaving hers. He did not imagine then that he wasn’t just referring to her sentiment but his own.

 

_Pulse elevated, pupils dilated._ If anyone had cared to observe, they would have seen it mirrored in him.

 

Walking away from the Woman after she had begged, with tears in her eyes as her world crumbled around her, had been difficult but necessary.

 

_I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage... Thank you for the final proof._ Mycroft had been right to warn him that caring was not an advantage. The realization that his… regard for the Woman had caused him to come so terrifyingly close to losing the game had hit him like a punch to the gut, making him word his caution to the Woman in harsher terms than perhaps strictly necessary. But it was a timely reminder to himself, if only he’d known then.

 

He’d realized sometime after he’d saved her in Karachi that his feelings for the Woman were far from simple. They’d parted on less than congenial terms, but he’d kept tabs on her. Making sure she’d last beyond six months had not been a simple task, even for him – tracking her down when she’d been determined to erase all traces of herself, subtly rooting out those of Jim Moriarty’s henchmen who’d been tasked to finish her off, infiltrating a terrorist cell, becoming sufficiently proficient in a language he had hitherto not spoken…

 

He’d put it down to some sense of _responsibility_ , at the time – if not for him she’d be a free woman; she’d have the protection that she’d been so determined to obtain. Yet the immense sense of relief that had swept over him as he’d managed to escape with the Woman had felt like something more than the discharge of a responsibility, had felt _personal_ in some sense.

 

After their escape and the very instructive night they’d spent together in Karachi _having dinner_ , he’d forced himself to stop tracing her steps, but those blasted texts and his overactive mind somehow continually supplied information to him without him even meaning to find out.

 

He’d never meant to respond to her texts. It was a bad idea. She was a bad idea. Establishing any sort of communication with her was a bad idea. But sometimes, on impulse, he would text her back. It was playing with fire, he knew, but he enjoyed the danger. It was all a game, after all.

 

And as he’d told John, it was just texting. But was it? John’s revelation about the fact that he’d cheated on Mary by texting another woman (Eurus, as it had turned out) had cast doubt on that premise.

 

And his reunion with his sister had shattered the illusion that he was immune to emotions. On hindsight, it was absolutely moronic of him to have played the song he’d composed in the wake of the Woman’s first death when Eurus had asked him to “play you”. Somehow Eurus had managed to deduce – from just a few notes of his violin – that he’d had sex. It was perhaps then that he’d realized the extent of Eurus’s powers.

 

And that debacle with Molly Hooper’s coffin had been, pun unintended, the nail in the coffin. She had been understanding enough after, of course – they’d thought her life at stake, they weren’t allowed to tell her what was going on. But the experience had nonetheless run a knife through their friendship, which was of course precisely what Eurus had intended. He loved his sister, but not how she waded through other people’s lives, looking for potential for destruction, waves of discord and mistrust roiling in her wake.

 

She was clever though, so clever, and more adept at understanding human emotions than he ever would be. It was precisely because Molly Hooper loved him that it had been so difficult for her to say those words that would save her. And it was precisely because he loved Molly Hooper that it had been so difficult for him to say the words she needed to hear to extract those same words from her. Getting her to say those words would both save her life and ruin it. Sherlock did not prize his ability to read others’ emotions, but he knew that it would hurt her deeply for him to say the words and later have to take them back. Still, he’d said them anyway. It wasn’t entirely a lie – he did love her, though certainly not in the way she loved him.

 

And not in the way he loved the Woman – loves the Woman.

 

There.

 

It is out in the open now, inasmuch as an admission in his mind can be considered out in the open. For Sherlock though, for whom the mind is everything, it is enough.

 

Eurus’s little game has torn it out of him, a dam has been unstoppered, and there is no going back. No more pretending.

 

The Woman’s latest text stares at him from the screen of his mobile phone. Sent thirty-three hours ago. He’s read it more times than he cares to count ( _14_ ), even though he’d memorized it from the first.

 

_Your escape from a mental institution sounds thrilling. Let’s have dinner and you can tell me all about it._

 

He recalls John’s impassioned entreaty to him, several weeks ago on his birthday, to _do something_. For all that he often thinks of John as being rather dim when it comes to observing things (despite all his other admittedly positive attributes), even John had figured it out before he had.

 

_You bloody moron!_ John had lost his temper at Sherlock. _She’s out there… she likes you, and she’s alive. Do you have the first idea how lucky you are?_ The subtext being: _And you like her too! Why won’t you go for it?_

 

There are plenty of reasons why he does not, so to speak, go for it.

 

John had described her, not unfairly, as a lunatic, a criminal, insanely dangerous, a sociopath. She is also scheming and manipulative and, in her own words, likes to _misbehave_. And yet he wouldn’t have it any other way. He wouldn’t have _her_ any other way. She is utterly fascinating, an endless mystery. The Woman. The only woman who matters.

 

No, the reason he does not reply her texts, does not accept her invitations to dinner is because throughout his life, he has treated emotions with an abhorrence usually reserved for serial killers (but serial killers he knows quite well how to handle; emotions he does not). He does not believe romantic entanglement will give him the fulfillment it seems to give everyone else.

 

And yet— he cannot lie to himself anymore – he wants to see the Woman again. The thought of diving back into their game of cat and mouse sends a thrill down his spine.

 

He taps out a short reply on his phone, his finger hovering over the send button.

 

Distasteful as the thought is, there is and always has been sentiment involved where the Woman is concerned. All the signs point to it – as he often says, _once you_ _eliminate the impossibl_ _e_ _, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth._ It is what it is.

It was sentiment, the way he’d kept that ridiculous, provocative text alert, the way his fingers itched to reach for his phone the moment he heard it. It was sentiment, going to Karachi to save her. Sentiment, the way he’d asked John for her phone and kept it in his drawer for no ostensible purpose after it had been stripped of all information. Sentiment, the way he frequently found her wandering around stark naked in his mind palace like she owned it.

 

Perhaps he has indeed been a bloody moron.

 

He hits send before he can change his mind.

 

_You know where to find me. SH._

 

~

 

1 This phrase is taken from the scene in “The Abominable Bride” where John Watson confronted Sherlock about the fact that Sherlock’s watch had a picture of Irene Adler in it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic for this fandom! Hope you all enjoy it :) 
> 
> Credits to https://arianedevere.livejournal.com/ for having a very comprehensive database of the transcripts for the BBC shows :)


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